Suicide Is Not Painless

It was one of those stories lost in the newspaper's inside pages.
Last week a man you've never heard of --- Charles D. Riechers, 47, the
second-highest-ranking procurement officer in the United States Air
Force --- killed himself by running his car's engine in his suburban
Virginia garage.

Mr. Riechers's suicide occurred just two weeks after his appearance
in a front-page exposé in The Washington Post. The Post reported that
the Air Force had asked a defense contractor, Commonwealth Research
Institute, to give him a job with no known duties while he waited for
official clearance for his new Pentagon assignment. Mr. Riechers, a
decorated Air Force officer earlier in his career, told The Post: "I
really didn't do anything for C.R.I. I got a paycheck from them." The
question, of course, was whether the contractor might expect favors in
return once he arrived at the Pentagon last January.

Set against the epic corruption that has defined the war in Iraq,
Mr. Riechers's tragic tale is but a passing anecdote, his infraction at
most a misdemeanor. The $26,788 he received for two months in a non-job
doesn't rise even to a rounding error in the Iraq-Afghanistan money pit.
So far some $6 billion worth of contracts are being investigated for
waste and fraud, however slowly, by the Pentagon and the Justice
Department. That doesn't include the unaccounted-for piles of cash, some
$9 billion in Iraqi funds, that vanished during L. Paul Bremer's short
but disastrous reign in the Green Zone. Yet Mr. Riechers, not the first
suicide connected to the war's corruption scandals, is a window into the
culture of the whole debacle.

Through his story you can see how America has routinely betrayed the
very values of democratic governance that it hoped to export to Iraq.
Look deeper and you can see how the wholesale corruption of government
contracting sabotaged the crucial mission that might have enabled us to
secure the country: the rebuilding of the Iraqi infrastructure, from
electricity to hospitals. You can also see just why the heretofore
press-shy Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater USA, staged a rapid-fire
media blitz a week ago, sitting down with Charlie Rose, Lara Logan, Lisa
Myers and Wolf Blitzer.

Mr. Prince wasn't trying to save his employees from legal
culpability in the deaths of 17 innocent Iraqis mowed down on Sept. 16
in Baghdad. He knows that the legal loopholes granted contractors by Mr.
Bremer back in 2004 amount to a get-out-of-jail-free card. He knows that
Americans will forget about another 17 Iraqi casualties as soon as
Blackwater gets some wrist-slapping punishment.

Instead, Mr. Prince is moving on, salivating over the next payday.
As he told The Wall Street Journal last week, Blackwater no longer cares
much about its security business; it is expanding into a "full spectrum"
defense contractor offering a "one-stop shop" for everything from
remotely piloted blimps to armored trucks. The point of his P.R.
offensive was to smooth his quest for more billions of Pentagon loot.

Which brings us back to Mr. Riechers. As it happens, he was only
about three degrees of separation from Blackwater. His Pentagon job,
managing a $30 billion Air Force procurement budget, had been previously
held by an officer named Darleen Druyun, who in 2004 was sentenced to
nine months in prison for securing jobs for herself, her daughter and
her son-in-law at Boeing while favoring the company with billions of
dollars of contracts. Ms. Druyun's Pentagon post remained vacant until
Mr. Riechers was appointed. He was brought in to clean up the corruption.

Yet the full story of the corruption during Ms. Druyun's tenure is
even now still unknown. The Bush-appointed Pentagon inspector general
delivered a report to Congress full of holes in 2005. Specifically,
black holes: dozens of the report's passages were redacted, as were the
names of many White House officials in the report's e-mail evidence on
the Boeing machinations.

The inspector general also assured Congress that neither Donald
Rumsfeld nor Paul Wolfowitz knew anything about the crimes. Senators on
the Armed Services Committee were incredulous. John Warner, the Virginia
Republican, could not believe that the Pentagon's top two officials had
no information about "the most significant defense procurement
mismanagement in contemporary history."

But the inspector general who vouched for their ignorance, Joseph
Schmitz, was already heading for the exit when he delivered his redacted
report. His new job would be as the chief operating officer of the
Prince Group, Blackwater's parent company.

Much has been made of Erik Prince and his family's six-digit
contributions to Republican candidates and lifelong connections to
religious-right power brokers like James Dobson and Gary Bauer. Mr.
Prince maintains that these contacts had nothing to do with Blackwater's
growth from tiny start-up to billion-dollar federal contractor in the
Bush years. But far more revealing, though far less noticed, is the
pedigree of the Washington players on his payroll.

Blackwater's lobbyist and sometime spokesman, for instance, is Paul
Behrends, who first represented the company as a partner in the
now-defunct Alexander Strategy Group. That firm, founded by a former Tom
De Lay chief of staff, proved ground zero in the Jack Abramoff scandals.
Alexander may be no more, but since then, in addition to Blackwater, Mr.
Behrends's clients have included a company called the First Kuwaiti
General Trading and Contracting Company, the builder of the new American
embassy in Iraq.

That Vatican-sized complex is the largest American embassy in the
world. Now running some $144 million over its $592 million budget and
months behind schedule, the project is notorious for its deficient,
unsafe construction, some of which has come under criminal
investigation. First Kuwaiti has also been accused of engaging in human
trafficking to supply the labor force. But the current Bush-appointed
State Department inspector general --- guess what --- has found no
evidence of any wrongdoing.

Both that inspector general, Howard Krongard, and First Kuwaiti are
now in the cross hairs of Henry Waxman's House oversight committee. Some
of Mr. Krongard's deputies have accused him of repeatedly halting or
impeding investigations in a variety of fraud cases.

Representative Waxman is also trying to overcome State Department
stonewalling to investigate corruption in the Iraqi government. In
perverse mimicry of his American patrons, Nuri al-Maliki's office has
repeatedly tried to limit the scope of inquiries conducted by Iraq's own
Commission on Public Integrity. The judge in charge of that commission,
Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, has now sought asylum in America. Thirty-one of
his staff members and a dozen of their relatives have been assassinated,
sometimes after being tortured.

The Waxman investigations notwithstanding, the culture of
corruption, Iraq war division, remains firmly entrenched. Though some
American bribe-takers have been caught --- including Gloria Davis, an
Army major who committed suicide in Kuwait after admitting her crimes
last year --- we are asked to believe they are isolated incidents. The
higher reaches of the chain of command have been spared, much as they
were at Abu Ghraib.

Even a turnover in administrations doesn't guarantee reform. J.
Cofer Black, the longtime C.I.A. hand who is now Blackwater's vice
chairman, has signed on as a Mitt Romney adviser. Hillary Clinton's Karl
Rove, Mark Penn, doubles as the chief executive of Burson-Marsteller,
the P.R. giant whose subsidiary helped prepare Mr. Prince for his
Congressional testimony. Mr. Penn said the Blackwater association was
"temporary."

War profiteering happens even in "good" wars. Arthur Miller made his
name in 1947 with "All My Sons," which ends with the suicide of a
corrupt World War II contractor whose defective airplane parts cost 21
pilots their lives. But in the case of Iraq, this corruption has been at
the center of the entire mission, from war-waging to nation-building. As
the investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
observed in the October Vanity Fair, America has to date "spent twice as
much in inflation-adjusted dollars to rebuild Iraq as it did to rebuild
Japan --- an industrialized country three times Iraq's size, two of
whose cities had been incinerated by atomic bombs." (And still Iraq
lacks reliable electric power.)

The cost cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and
money. There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence was summed up
by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an
innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at age
44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus
training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time
the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.

Colonel Westhusing's death was ruled a suicide, though some believe
he was murdered by contractors fearing a whistle-blower, according to T.
Christian Miller, the Los Angeles Times reporter who documents the case
in his book "Blood Money." Either way, the angry four-page letter the
officer left behind for General Petraeus and his other commander, Gen.
Joseph Fil, is as much an epitaph for America's engagement in Iraq as a
suicide note.